The Wit & Wisdom of M.C. Beaton

Culture - Article | Thu 7 May

Remembering the creator of detectives Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth

A prolific writer who brought pleasure to millions of adoring readers, Marion Chesney (best known by her pen name, M.C. Beaton) was a well-loved figure in the Cotswold community.

Over 21 million copies of her books have been sold, and she is frequently named the best-borrowed author from UK libraries.

The Cotswold Homes team remembers her as a witty and generous interviewee, filled with hair-raising anecdotes about her time as a crime reporter in the Glasgow slums and wry observations about the world of publishing.

Born in Balornock, Glasgow, Chesney began her working life as a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son, the oldest bookshop in the city, before joining the Scottish Daily Mail as a theatre critic. Later, she worked as crime reporter for the Scottish Daily Express.

Her years as a Fleet Street reporter in the 1960s saw her covering the Profumo affair and the antics of British fascist Oswald Mosley. She then moved to America with her husband, journalist Harry Scott Gibbons, where she began her career as a prolific writer of fiction. She wrote over 160 romance novels under a variety of pen names, including Anne Fairfax and Jennie Tremaine.

Marion and her family returned to England and made a home in the Cotswolds, where she turned her hand to crime writing – to great success. Famously, she detested being described as a writer of ‘cosy’crime fictionand disliked the BBC adaptation of her Hamish Macbeth series. Agatha Raisin was later adapted for television by Sky TV– a third series was commissioned in 2019.

In celebration of Marion’s life and literary achievements, we’re publishing some excerpts from our favourite interviews with the author.

M.C Beaton on her childhood:

“My mother was very Highlands. She used to put a saucer of milk out for the fairies –though the hedgehogs would drink it, she’d think it was the fairies. Very superstitious. She’d had a very hard life, as well. She would play piano for the silent movies. She worked in a music shop in Glasgow, and if you wanted to know the latest musical from London, a girl like my mother would sit down and play the whole thing for you. She was very talented in that way, but she was a difficult person.

“I lived in libraries. To me, they were palaces of dreams. I would look around the shelves and dream of one day being a published author. I dreamed I would have a publisher in Belgravia. When Constable & Robinson took me over, they had a publishing house in Belgravia—and it was Georgian…!”

On her time as a crime reporter:

“The only time I ever got punched was by a Daily Mail photographer, because I was keeping crime witnesses away from the papers. It was sordid, ghastly –the poverty, dear God. The lice, the smell, the razor gangs…the axemen even had their own pub to disassociate from the lower class, the razor gangs. When I got a transfer to London, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. There, the newspapers were all nice to one another.”

On moving to the Cotswolds:

“I remember looking at all these hills through the fog and thinking that there was a probably a splendid party going on over on the other side, to which I hadn’t been invited. And then, when the time came to go back up to London, I suddenly felt as though I no longer belonged: I couldn’t wait to get on the train [back to the Cotswolds]. It’s beautiful everywhere you look…it’s like driving through a series of English landscape paintings.”

On writing over 160 books:

“I think there’s more than that, but I forget how many. Now I’m pushing eighty, I really would like to write just one book a year. That would be luxury…or would it? Would I just fart around and do it at the last minute?”

On being a writer:

“I think of myself more of an escape artist than a writer. The moment people hear the word writer, they start thinking of the Booker Prize and the literary world and the Great Novel. Well, you can’t write beyond your capabilities…you can’t pretend at another kind of writing.

“I had a friend in Paris who said: “You’ve got a very good literary background –why don’t you try writing something different.”He meant better. And I said: “You don’t get it. This might be very light and frivolous and easy to read but I’m writing to my very best –really, my very best.”

“Funnily enough, you can’t write in another genre just because it happens to be popular, or you become childish. I once tried to write a Scottish historical. It was dreadful.

“I’m often damned as being cosy. I don’t mind so long as people still like [the books], but it’s a bit patronising. It reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s famous remark, when he was asked to speak at festivals, in the way I am, that there often seems to be a subtext that says “of course I don’t read your books but my gardener’s son simply adores them,”and you try not to spit on the stage!”

On Scottish writers:

“Of course, sex and drugs does have its place. The black humour of the sort that you get from Stuart McBride is very funny. Val McDermid [is] a frighteningly intelligent woman. And there’s Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin…so many great writers from Scotland [laughs]. Of course, a lot of us started with our admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. What a wonderful, exciting piece of writing.”

On flawed detectives:

“The actress who plays Saga in The Bridge is brilliant–a sort of Asperger’s James Bond, almost invulnerable…But it got soppy! You see her background! I don’t want to see her background –I loved Columbo because you never saw Mrs Columbo. And Cagney and Lacey died a bit over a drunken father and a stupid unemployed husband…You don’t want too much of their private lives.

“The idiots who were filming my Hamish Macbeth –well, in my opinion they were idiots –they said“We must bring out his dark side.”To which I said: “He hasn’t got one.”They said: “He isn’t married.”I said: “You don’t get married until you’re about 40 in the Highlands.”And Robert Carlyle insisted that Hamish smoke pot –he said if the pot smoking was taken out then he would leave the series.

“Agatha’s problems are human. She drinks a bit –well, socially, she drinks a lot – but she’s not an alcoholic!”

On the process of writing:

“Somebody asked me once: “How do you target your readers?” You can’t target them. If you start targeting them, you’re dead. Sit down, begin at the beginning and go on to the end.

“You have to write what you enjoy. The brain is like a computer: you can only get out what you put in. The essence of storytelling is often forgotten…You’re talking to the reader. You’ve got to grab their attention. You don’t want them to get bored.

“Readers have got to be amused, got to be taken out of themselves. I think, for me, a detective story is a bit of P.G. Wodehouse, a bit of romance and a bit of a crossword puzzle.”